Thursday, April 11, 2019

Review - A Mother Should Be Loved

April 11, 2019

A Mother Should Be
Loved – Japan, 1934

I am feeling a bit torn at the moment. While I know what I
want to say about Yasujiro Ozu’s 1934 drama A
Woman Should Be Loved, I am not as certain just how much I should express.
This is, of course, a question that many reviewers grapple with, especially in
this age of spoiler alerts and
frustration when pivotal plot details are revealed, even from movies for which expectations
of secrecy seem rather unreasonable. After all, if you haven’t seen a movie
within a few years of its theatrical release, I think you lose the right to
demand complete discretion on the part of people writing or talking about it.

However, what do you do with a film like A Mother Should Be Loved? This is a film
that has yet to appear on DVD or Blu-ray in the United States. To view it, one
must order it from a UK-based website, as well as have a region-free DVD player.
And then there’s the Criterion factor. Since the company has put out so many of
Ozu’s other films, potential viewers may be waiting for their eventual release of
this one, thus making the BFI release something they feel quite safe passing
on.

So, here are a few things that people with this mindset
should be aware of. First, the bad news. A
Mother Should Be Loved is an incomplete film – the first and last reels
have been lost, meaning that the film no longer contains a significant part of
its set-up and its entire finale – and rarely do films in this state get a
formal stand-alone release. On the other hand, what remains of the film has
been remarkably well preserved, so much so that it is hard to imagine what even
a company like Criterion could add to it, barring the miraculous discovery of
the entire film in an abandoned attic somewhere in Japan.

Yet there is another consideration. A Mother Should Be Loved is one of Ozu’s most Japanese films. In
describing it this way, I do not mean to imply anything negative about its
quality or the performances of its cast. It has all to do with its central
conflict, and here is where the spoiler
alert conundrum comes in – As Shakespeare might have put it: To reveal or
not to reveal? So, read the rest at your own discretion.

A Mother Should Be
Loved is about a family that loses its patriarch, a topic Ozu addressed in
greater detail in his 1941 film, Brothers
and Sisters of the Toda Family. Here, the family consists of just four
people, and sadly the father dies never having fulfilled a simple promise, that
of taking his sons to the beach. I suspect that an American film with this
set-up with end with the mother and the two sons looking out at the glorious
waters of the blue sea, an act that would symbolize coming full circle. Ozu was
never one for such sentiment. The father’s death is never even explained,
although from everything we learn throughout the film, it was likely the result
of either overwork or cancer, a possibility that casts a pall over later scenes
of his sons, now older, honoring their father by taking up his habit of smoking
a pipe. Nor is it ever explained how his widow, Chieko (Mitsuko Yoshikawa),
makes enough money to send both of her sons to university.

The central conflict of the film arises when Sadao (played
as an adult by Den Obinata and as a child by Seiichi Kato), the oldest of the
two sons, applies for university and gets his first look at his birth
certificate. Spoiler alert: He is not his mother’s son. In an early scene,
Chieko is urged by a family friend (Ozu regular Chishu Ryu) to continue raising Sadao as if he were her
son, and it is suggested that the deception is necessary for Chieko to be able
to raise him as her own flesh and blood And here is where I think the film becomes somewhat
inaccessible for Western audiences. Thousands of parents take on this sort of
responsibility every year, and they do so without the need for subterfuge. In
addition, just as many children learn every year that they have been adopted or
that one of their parents had been previously married to someone else. Children
eventually just accept these things and move on. Even in the more conservative
days of the 1930s, it was hardly taboo for a widower to remarry and for his
second wife to assume the maternal role for any children he’d had with his
previous wife. So when Sadao starts acting cruel to his stepmother and then throws
himself on the floor and sobs uncontrollably, non-Japanese audiences may be
forgiven for giving a collective shrug and thinking, “What’s this all about?”
and “What an ungrateful boy!”

Now, it’s telling that Chieko never expresses these
sentiments. In fact, she does the opposite: she endorses them, implying that
they are justified, even years later, yet the film never attempts to explain
why. What exactly are the social implications of being raised by your father’s
second wife? What bearing, if any, does that have on your friends and potential
employers? And why doesn’t the truth make Sadao more grateful and sympathetic
to the woman who raised him? I wanted to know. Perhaps the intended audience
simply didn’t need to.

The film was made in 1934, a time when nationalistic fervor
was rising and the Japanese government was on the verge of going to war in
Asia. There is no reference to this, yet curiously the film includes one
reference to Western influence. In the room of a local prostitute hangs a
poster of Joan Crawford’s 1932 film Rain,
in which Crawford portrays a prostitute named Sadie Thompson. Sadie is
eventually able to escape her old life through marriage with a police sergeant.
Perhaps Ozu is suggesting that the prostitute in Ozu’s film has visions of a
similar happy ending with Sadao, an example, perhaps, of the West perpetuating
unrealistic and culturally unacceptable notions to society at large.

Unfortunately (for Western audiences, at least), the film
never moves on from the narrative thread of “stepmother problem,” and that is
to the film’s detriment, for what doesn’t resonate early on still doesn’t
resonates later. To me, this lessened the impact the film might otherwise have
had. I didn’t empathize with the characters as much as I normally do when
watching an Ozu film. In fact, I found myself wondering at the injustice of it
all. Here was a movie in which a man could move on from grief and find
happiness in a second marriage. However, his wife could do neither. She seemed
to be required to be in a perpetual state of mourning, never able to move on,
never able to find contentment outside of the success of her sons. Her late
husband was ever-present, staring down from an altar affixed to the wall, as if
he had been all she would ever need for the rest of her life. Again, I wondered
why. I know there’s an explanation for it, some rationale that, at the very
least, explains the thinking behind such portrayals of women as being capable
of eternal loyalty, but it is a concept that Ozu himself moved away from, as
evident from the ending of Tokyo Story.

With A Mother Should
Be Loved, we get one of Ozu’s most unapproachable films. For some, this
will be a challenge and a beautiful one at that. I felt it was an obstacle to
any full enjoyment of the film. A Mother
Should Be Loved is certainly watchable. It has good performances, and Ozu again
puts his mastery of imagery and close-ups on display throughout. However, the
film is more likely to be enjoyed as a curiosity, as a blip in the repertoire
of a man known for producing far more masterpieces than works of mediocrity. A Woman Should Be Loved, it bring me no
pleasure to say, is an example of the latter, much more akin to There Was a Father than Late Spring or Good Morning. It is one of only a small handful of Ozu’s films that
I am content to watch only once, and that is a telling statement in and of
itself. (on DVD in Region B)